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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

"One More Indicted in Harlem Riot," New York Evening Journal, March 29, 1935, 3.

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James Hughes arrested Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10:00 PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the man and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted that the stones were to defend himself and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.

Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th Street and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue before returning home for supper and then heading out again at 9:30pm to go drinking, according to details in the probation officer's preliminary investigation that were not included in the report to the court. When Hughes set out on 8th Avenue for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets and heard people saying “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a shoe repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked; in the preliminary report, the probation officer noted that Hughes said that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed." While several newspapers reported that businesses that employed Black staff were not spared from attack, Koch's department store did not have windows broken.

The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post and Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only that Hughes had been discharged, not that he had been rearrested.) Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.

When Hughes appeared for sentencing, the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from a minister named Haynes received by the mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later, Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against that evidence Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”

Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation Department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice, and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer J. T. Sloane determined Hughes' participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the Probation Department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the workhouse.

Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to whom he became apprenticed. The probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr. Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year, he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later, he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.

Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense."
Edward Larry arrested At 1:00 AM, Patrolman William Clements observed Edward Larry, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer, traveling in a taxi at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue. He stopped the taxi, and found that Larry had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Not satisfied with Larry’s explanation that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, Clements took him to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. The Magistrates Court affidavit simply described Clements as arresting Larry; the Home News report of Larry's appearance in the Magistrates Court described Clements arresting Larry "as he was about to get into a taxicab with two boxes containing a dozen shirts." The more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation described Clements stopping the cab.

Larry was one of nine men arrested away from the scene of their alleged crime, a group making up one third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60). Although he was the only one arrested in a vehicle, a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal indicated that this was not the only instance in which police stopped vehicles. Larry told police he was returning home to the Salvation Army shelter at 224 West 124th Street, behind Kress' store (some reports listed the address as 218 West 124th Street; the MCCH business survey records that the Salvation Army operated in both buildings). He had lived there for a month, after spending two weeks at the Belmont Hotel on the Bowery, and the previous thirty days in the workhouse serving a sentence for pickpocketing.

At the police station, Morris Towbin saw Larry and identified him as one of a group of men who had threatened him and robbed his haberdashery store at 101 West 125th Street at 10:30 PM the previous evening. Towbin also identified the shirts in Larry's possession as from his store, part of $2,000 of merchandise stolen, $1,000 of fixtures destroyed and $226.89 worth of plate glass windows smashed. Towbin's encounter with Larry was described only in the more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation. The Magistrates Court affidavit recorded only that Towbin had identified the shirts, a standard feature of a charge when an individual had not been seen stealing goods, and that he could "positively identify the defendant as one of the men" who had robbed him. In the police blotter, the charge against Larry was recorded as burglary. That record suggested that Towbin's identification came after his initial booking and after police provided that information to reporters, as the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, both included Larry among those charged with burglary. Towbin's allegation of force changed the offense to robbery, which is the charge made against Larry in the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, there was no mention of force or robbery in the story covering his court appearance in the Home News or in reports of Towbin's statements as president of Harlem Merchants Association in the Daily News and Home News. Nor did police find a knife in Larry's possession, the weapon with which Towbin said he had been threatened. Larry's criminal record did not suggest he would have used a weapon as none of his convictions involved the use of force.

When Larry was arraigned in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held him without bail for the grand jury. He was one of only seven of those arrested during the disorder for which magistrates did not set bail. Nine days later, on March 29, the grand jury indicted him for robbery in the first degree. It was likely this was the indictment mentioned in stories in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and New York American: while the latter two stories gave no details of the case, the New York Times referred to the unnamed defendant being "charged with burglary in the looting of an East 125th Street store." No one else arrested in the disorder was indicted on March 29. Rather than go to trial, Larry agreed to a plea bargain. On April 5, he appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty to attempted grand larceny in the second degree, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison rather than up to twenty years, the punishment for robbery in the first degree. Ten days later, after an investigation by the Probation Department, Judge Nott sentenced Larry to a term of between fifteen months and thirty months in the state prison. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded a different sentence of six months to two years, but the Probation Department investigation and a response to the parole board in the district attorney's case file both record the longer sentence). That was the longest sentence given to anyone arrested in the disorder, a reflection of the charge, and of Larry’s criminal record. He had been convicted three times for picking pockets in New York City in the three years before the disorder, and most significantly, convicted for grand larceny in West Virginia in 1928. New York's Habitual Offender statute, commonly known as the Baumes Act, required that in cases involving individuals with a previous conviction for a felony that a plea bargain be to a felony and set minimum sentences based on the previous felony conviction.

Larry had been born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1909. His mother died when he was three years of age, leaving his father, and later stepmother to raise him. In 1921, a year after leaving school at age eleven to work in a cotton press, Larry left home. In the only response the Probation Department received to the letters they sent inquiring about Larry's history, the Wilmington Public Welfare Commission reported an interview with his half-sister Rose, in which she said he found work in a coal mine in West Virginia. Larry himself told the Probation Department officer G. H. Royal that he first worked briefly for a transportation company, traveling to Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent two months in a fish factory, followed by time on a truck in Far Rockaway, New York, then in a steel mill in Pittsburgh and a coal mine in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1924, aged fifteen, he began working irregularly for carnival companies that traveled the North in the summer and the South in the winter.

In February 1928, carnival work, or perhaps coal mining, brought Larry to Welch, West Virginia, where he was convicted of grand larceny. The court did not respond to the Probation Department's request for details of the case; Larry told them that he and another man were accused of stealing money from a drunken man in a poolroom (given Larry's record, the theft was likely accomplished by pickpocketing). Sentenced to six years in the state prison, Larry said he served four years and eight months, which would have seen him released in June 1932. By May 28, 1933, Larry was in New York City; he also said that earlier that month, while working in a carnival, he married Cora Temple, a dancer, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In New York City, Larry was arrested for pickpocketing — the criminal record in the district attorney's case file specifying "lush," slicing open the pocket of a drunken individual — and sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse. After his release, he remained in New York City for at least six months, presumably with his wife Cora, but without a home and relying on charity. According to his half sister, Larry returned to Wilmington in December 1933, and found work as a stevedore until July 1934; he told the Probation Department he did not visit until July 1934, and left his wife there while he looked for work.

Almost as soon as Larry arrived back in New York City, on July 29, police arrested him for pickpocketing, again lush, according to the criminal record in the District Attorney's case file. On this occasion, he was sentenced to six months in the Workhouse. Released in January 1935, it was less than a month before officers from the police pickpocket squad arrested him again, and he spent a further 30 days in the Workhouse. In the month between his release and the disorder, he told the Probation Department that he spent a week working on a Salvation Army project in Flushing, Long Island.
Completing the legal process (March 28-November) A week after those arrested during the disorder began to appear in the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates court, the prosecutions of approximately sixty-four of those men and women had been completed. It would take almost eight months for judges and juries to come to decisions regarding the fate of the remaining forty-nine men and two women. Those proceedings went largely unreported. After the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, New York American and New York Amsterdam News published stories about cases in the Harlem court and Court of General Sessions on March 28, only four other trials were mentioned in the press. The Daily Worker published stories on the trials of Communist Party members or at least those represented by ILD lawyers: the only story about Joseph Moore and one of only two stories about the trial of Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators in the Court of Special Sessions. The involvement of ILD lawyers and the verdict in their favor made those trials an obvious vehicle for promoting the Communist Party. It is less clear why the other story about the later trial was published, in the Black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News, which also published the one story about the trial of Paul Boyett. Boyett was acquitted of assaulting a white man, suggesting that the Black newspaper was concerned to give attention to outcomes that discredited the idea that the disorder had been a race riot. The story mentioned only Boyett's defense, so literally kept the alleged assault out of the story. The New York Amsterdam News may have also published the story about the trial involving the Communists because the same publications and individuals who had sought to blame them had also cast the disorder as a race riot. The New York Times rather than either of those publications reported the one other case that attracted attention, the trial of James Hughes. Unaffiliated with the Communist Party and found guilty of throwing a rock that hit a police officer, that case did not align with the apparent agendas of those publications. Why the New York Times reported the trial is not clear; it was the only legal proceeding related to the disorder that the newspaper reported after March 28.

Unreported, the final eight of those arrested during the disorder trickled out of the Magistrates courts over the next three weeks as police completed investigations. Magistrate Ford disposed of the last of those arrested in the jurisdiction of the Washington Heights court on April 9, when Charles Alston was sufficiently recovered from injuries suffered fleeing police to appear and have the assault charges against him dismissed, the same outcome as the three men arrested with him. Magistrate Renaud did not dispose of the last case before him in the Harlem court for nearly two more weeks. The extended police investigation of that case likely was a result of the defendant, Frank Wells, having ties to the Communist Party. However, police did not produce evidence to support the allegation that Wells had broken the window of a store on 125th Street, resulting in the charge against him being reduced to disorderly conduct. On April 20, a month after the first of those arrested in the disorder appeared in his court, Renaud convicted Wells and sent him to the workhouse for 30 days.

The grand jury continued to vote for charges in all of the final twenty cases involving individuals arrested during the riot presented to them, as they had with almost all the previous cases, but those decisions did not signal that they had been presented evidence of serious/felonious acts. The grand jury sent only seventeen of those arrested in the disorder to the Court of General Sessions charged with felonies, and only one of the final twenty cases. All the remainder, and just over half of all the cases related to the disorder, the grand jury sent to be tried on lesser misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions. The last case involving an arrest during the disorder presented to the grand jury was the one case presented after March 27 for which the grand jury voted an indictment. On April 23 it charged Paul Boyett with assaulting a white man. The grand also twice heard evidence about the killing of sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs by Patrolman John McInerney, first on April 10, and then again on June 10, after the MCCH found additional witnesses. On both occasions the all-white grand jury dismissed the case, finding the white officer justified in killing of the Black boy.

The combination of cases sent from the grand jury and those sent directly to the court by magistrates made trials in the Court of Special Sessions the proceeding in which most of the remaining cases were decided. Those trials received almost no attention from the press even as the panel of three magistrates who presided convicted three out of every four of those who appeared. Eight of the nine men not convicted appeared in the court in the weeks after March 27. A single trial, of the four Communists, produced half of those acquittals, two months after the disorder, on June 21. A further five months later, the final trial did result in a conviction, of the other white man arrested at the beginning of the disorder, Harry Gordon, for assaulting a police officer.

Convictions were almost as often the outcome for those those sent to the Court of General Sessions as for those sent to the Court of Special Sessions, but the process was different. All but one of those convicted accepted the plea bargains that prosecutors offered as a standard practice at this time, eight after March 27 following Carl Jones, Hezekiah Wright, Joseph Wade and Thomas Jackson earlier. They pled guilty to a lesser offense, which for all but one of those arrested was a misdemeanor, which effectively erased the distinction between being convicted in the Court of General Sessions and in the Court of Special Sessions. Two other men were released without trial, Milton Ackerman and Raymond Easley. All five of the men put on trial in this court appeared more than a week after the disorder, reflecting the multiple steps involved in prosecuting a felony. Only three had their guilt decided by a jury. The judge directed the acquittal of Joseph Moore, while Arnold Ford pled guilty during his trial. Just one man was convicted by a jury, James Hughes, but he too was found guilty of only a misdemeanor. Despite being charged with assaulting white men, both Isaac Daniels and Paul Boyett were acquitted. Boyett was the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Court of General Sessions, on May 29. That left Edward Larry as the only individual convicted of a felony, having pled guilty to attempted grand larceny rather than face trial on a charge of robbery. While he was only person charged with that offense, his previous felony conviction had more to do with the outcome of this prosecution than what he allegedly had done in the disorder.
In court on March 27 A week after the disorder, three men appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty, becoming the first of those arrested to be convicted in the city’s felony court. However, the outcome of those prosecutions did not establish the men as major figures in the disorder, distinct from those who had been convicted in the lower courts. While Joseph Wade, Thomas Jackson, and Hezekiah Wright had all been charged with burglary, they pled guilty to lesser offenses: Wright and Jackson to unlawful entry, which did not involve breaking into a store; Wade to petit larceny, which involved being in possession of stolen merchandise but not entry into a store. Notwithstanding those differences, both crimes were misdemeanors that carried the same sentence of up to a year rather than up to ten years for burglary. The men were not sentenced at this time, so the consequences of their plea bargains were not immediately apparent. That they had been convicted of “lesser offenses” was noted in the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times, but not in the New York Post and New York Amsterdam News. Plea bargaining was by far the most common outcome of felony prosecutions in this period, so that outcome may not have been perceived as entirely diminishing their actions. Nor did a plea necessarily indicate an admission of guilt. Wright would later assert his innocence, saying that he had pled guilty on the advice of his lawyer.

The grand jury added to the picture of the disorder as composed of minor actions by sending all four of the men whose cases were presented to it on this day to the Court of Special Sessions, charged with misdemeanors not felonies. All had faced charges of riot, Leon Mauraine, David Smith, and John Kennedy Jones also charged with malicious mischief for breaking windows, and John King with assault. Only the Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, and the New York Times, reported the hearings, but without names as the grand jury hearings were closed.

The four men who appeared in the Harlem court appeared to present a countervailing picture. Three were sent to the grand jury on riot charges. One, Raymond Easley, had already been indicted by the grand jury as a result of Dodge’s investigation. He was the last subject of that investigation to appear in court, although only one of the two newspapers that reported the hearing mentioned him. However, the outcomes of the three men's prosecutions would follow the same pattern as the hearings that occurred on same day: James Pringle and Claude Jones would be sent to the Court of Special Sessions, and Easley’s indictment would be dismissed. The magistrate continued the investigation of two other men, Leroy Brown and William Ford. Both would later be sent to the grand jury, and like the others, to the Court of Special Sessions. The magistrate sent the final man, Harry Gordon, directly to the Court of Special Sessions. Two days of additional police investigations had failed to produce enough evidence to send him to the grand jury. With Gordon’s ILD lawyer in attendance, the magistrate would have had little scope to overlook the deficiencies in the evidence. Gordon would not face trial for another seven months, the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in court. In the interim, he would testify in a public hearing of the MCCH and describe being beaten both when he was arrested and while in custody. His testimony persuaded the chairman of those hearings, Arthur Garfield Hays, but not the judges in the Court of Special Sessions. They convicted him; the sentence they imposed is unknown. He was one of only two men known to have been convicted of an assault during the disorder — although there is no evidence that outcome was reported in the press.

Rather than building toward the prosecution of individuals who played major roles in the disorder, the legal response to the disorder saw serious charges become misdemeanors and frequently the even lesser offense of disorderly conduct. Those arrested by police proved not to be responsible for much of the violence and damage. Instead, they had been among the crowds drawn to the streets and into encounters with police. The extent of the violence of the disorder consequently was not brought into focus in the criminal courts. Only later, in the civil courts, would some of the scale of the damage, if not the violence and injuries, become part of the legal record.
In the grand jury on March 27 (4) The two Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and the New York American, and the New York Times, were the only newspapers to report these grand jury hearings. All three stories were published on March 29 and referred to the hearings occurring on March 28. However, the district attorney's case files for the men all record the date of the grand jury decision as March 27. As the legal record is more reliable as evidence of the legal process, the hearings are treated as having occurred on March 27.

As grand jury proceedings are closed, none of the stories identified the men involved, a detail that the Hearst newspapers mentioned. The New York Times provided a very precise description of the outcome: "The grand jurors also sent to Special Sessions 'informations' against four persons accused of unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor, for trial in that court before three justices instead of a jury." That story did not make clear that the men had been charged with riot; unlawful assembly was the misdemeanor form of that charge. The New York Evening Journal and New York American published identical stories about the hearing. It more briefly mentioned four informations returned by the grand jury, described as "investigating last week's Communist-inspired rioting in Harlem." That description was at odds with the previous day's stories reporting Dodge's announcement that the grand jury investigation had halted. The end of that investigation is likely why the other publications that had reported the earlier grand jury hearings did not publish stories on these cases.

All three stories also referred to one indictment returned on the same day, likely that of Edward Larry, the one person arrested during the disorder whose district attorney's case file recorded his grand jury hearing took place on March 29.
In the Court of General Sessions on March 28 (2) The appearances of both James Hughes and Milton Ackerman were reported in a New York Times story that covered legal proceedings involving individuals arrested in the disorder in the grand jury, Court of General Sessions and the Harlem court. It mentioned that Hughes pleaded guilty to third degree assault of a police officer, and the judge's discharge of Ackerman on a charge of burglary for taking rolls of paper and a napkin. The story, the only one to mention the appearance, contained no information on why the judge released Ackerman. (The New York Times would later report Hughes subsequently withdrew his guilty plea and was tried and convicted.)

The two Hearst newspapers the New York Evening Journal and New York American published essentially the same story that reported Hughes' plea, together with the grand jury proceedings, but not the Harlem court case. The New York American added the date when Hughes would be sentenced. All three newspapers identified him as a shoemaker.